Maths Journals Open Up

Cambridge University Press launched this month the online Forum of Mathematics journals and will bankroll them by waiving charges to authors for three years.

FIELDS Medal winner Terry Tao will serve as an editor for a new set of open access journals in mathematics. An expatriate Australian based at the University of California Los Angeles, he is joined on the board by fellow Fields medallist Tim Gowers, whose blog post led to the "Cost of Knowledge'' boycott of commercial publisher Elsevier. The board embraces academics from well-known universities as well as mathematician Henry Kohn from Microsoft's Research New England lab.

CUP said the new journals would follow "the same high levels of peer review process as traditional subscription journals''. Articles would be available free of charge online. The publication cost to authors would be in the order of £500-£700 pounds, modest by current standards. CUP is expected to seek philanthropic support to keep charges low.

Costs will be contained by offering print-on-demand only.

Forum of Mathematics, Pi, would be a generalist journal, while Forum of Mathematics, Sigma, would be specialist, and papers in various fields of mathematics would be organised in clusters. The journals open for submissions on October 1.